So, there we were without a lunch provider and the distinct possibility that we were going to have to produce 100 lunches per day ourselves. But all was not lost, as my office manager had a contact in a large primary school approximately 15 minutes away, and after a couple of conversations we were set. They would be prepared to produce our lunches, and start quickly, but the only issue was that we would have to get them ourselves and drop off our empties at the end of each day.
Being a small school, with a tight budget, we did not have the capacity to employ a new member of staff to do this, so we had to rely on my office manager kindly agreeing to do this on our behalf, out of her existing hours. This was not ideal but our only option at that time.
We stuck with this for as long as we could, but when my office manager moved on to another job we were seriously up the creek without any kind of paddle. We needed to find another supplier, one that would deliver, and do it quickly.
As luck would have it, we landed on our feet when we made contact with a catering company in a nearby village, as they agreed to take us on. This company could not have been more different to the ‘meals on wheels’ or school kitchens we had been working with, as they had started their business catering for high end weddings and parties. I took a group of children and a teaching assistant to their kitchen for a taster session, and we were absolutely blown away by the quality of the food that we were given. We signed up on the spot and then set about organising a session where parents would be invited in to test the proposed meals. Everything was going great, at last.
The first sniff of a problem came at the parent session, when several noses were firmly turned up to the dishes that they were presented with. The one comment that particularly stuck with me was one parent who loudly exclaimed that the lamb koftas “looked like turds”. Despite our ups and downs over the last couple of years I was undeterred and my Oliver-like determination to improve the diets of our children remained, so we launched the new meals to some excited children.
As a head teacher my time was precious and lunchtimes were often taken up with catching up with staff who I couldn’t talk to during class time. For the next year this went out of the window as I spent nearly every lunchtime in the dinner hall encouraging, cajoling and even pleading with the children to try the food. Staff loved the new meals, and they were making the most of the leftovers available, which were plentiful. I soon realised that we had essentially made the meals too nice for the children so they were voting with their lunchboxes. Even children who were entitled to a free meal were choosing to bring in their own lunches, so we were in trouble again!
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